Measures for Progress: A History of the National Bureau of Standards

280 THE TIDE OF COMMERCE AND INDUSTRY (1920-30)
rubber was concerned with their construction, quality, care, and use.172 In
the late twenties, as British control of natural rubber resources in the Far East
shot prices sky high, the Bureau extended its product testing to more basic
research, including comparative studies of natural, reclaimed, and synthetic
rubbers.
Attention first turned to the possibility of growing natural rubber in
Mexico and California, and some progress was made at the Bureau in pro-
ducing from the guayule bush a sheet rubber that compared favorably with
the latex from plantation rubber.'73 A preliminary investigation was also
made in the chemistry of synthetic rubber, a project abandoned in the depres-
sion thirties when rubber prices fell with everything else. Work on synthetic
rubber was not resumed until the eve of World War II."
All through the 1930's rubber manufacturers stoutly maintained the
merits of reclaimed rubber, which was being used in larger and larger pro-
portions in the making of tires. Bureau tests of tires and other products
from reworked scrap and waste rubber indicated little basis for the manu-
facturers' claims. The reduced quality and durability of the tires, said the
Bureau, actually made them more costly than tires from high-priced new
rubber. Not until natural rubber became available again with victory in
the Pacific did the tire industry admit that the Bureau had been right
all along.'75
Investigations in 1917—18 of storage batteries used in the electric
trucks and tractors of the Army, in submarines, submarine mines, and air-
planes resulted in numerous improvements in their construction, the data
appearing in a circular issued shortly after the war."° Scarcely any of the
improvements, however, found their way into the batteries offered to the gen-
eral public. As a result, few products were more deficient electrically and
mechanically or stood in greater need of standardization and reduction in
sizes and kinds than the storage batteries used for starting and lighting auto-
mobiles.177 Working with the standards committees of the American Insti-
tute of Electrical Engineers and the Society of Automotive Engineers, Dr.
NBS Annual Report 1926, p. 31. The tire research was reported in T283 (1925),
T318 (1926), C320 (1927), C341 (1927), all by Holt and Wormeley, and J. Walter
Drake, "The automobile: its province and problems," Ann. Am. Acad. Pol. Soc. Sci. 116,
1 (1924).
T353 (Spence and Boon, 1927).
lIt C427 (Wood, 1940).
T294 (Holt and Wormeley, 1925). C393 (McPherson, 1931), p. 17, said that
reclaimed rubber at 7 cents per pound cost the consumer more per unit of abrasion than
new rubber at 20 cents or even 40 cents.
C92 (Vinal and Pearson, 1920).
NBS Annual Report 1920, p. 86.